You used to be able to identify morons just by grammar and spelling errors. Now you have to judge it by the content, which is more time consuming and difficult. It's to the point where I have to use AI to sift through a web search because of the AI generated trash everywhere. At some point the AI generated trash will become the dominant form of content and not even an AI will be able to sift through it.

like book covers for fanfic etc—that shit fuckin boggles me. Like if you aren’t doing this for money or clout, why aren’t you just sharing 100% your own creativity?

Because fanfic authors are not visual artists, so they lack the skill. But probably still want the visual appeal and associations that come with having a (non-stock) book cover.

Isn’t that the reason to share creative stuff, to share a part of your “soul” with others and hope to genuinely touch someone, across time and space?

I think that's getting a bit metaphysical. I think for a lot of people it's just the impulse to share something neat. The mere fact that you think it's neat means you're sharing something of yourself, just not on this soul-bearing level that you're talking about. It's like the difference between sharing a cute cat pic and sharing your true thoughts on your own cat whom you love and cherish.

What really boggles me is when I open a game and the ui buttons are ai. Why? It must have taken you longer to have your engine generate those graphics than it would've to just grabbed some royalty free ones. I really don't understand it. I've even seen what are clearly ai generated emojis as buttons.

big if true

Honestly, between this, the growing gap between climate action and its consequences, and the march towards fascism, the brain kind or has to tune out for self preservation.

There have been a struggle with AI books flooding since 2023

wow! I'd love to do that again! how did you "restart"?

a custom search string URL may be what you're looking for

for example, I use the following with the Fennec fork of Firefox Android to restrict the date to before the public launch of ChatGPT, while simultaneously disabling DuckDuckGo's AI features:

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s&df=1979-01-01..2022-11-29

here's DDG's guide on search URL parameters; most major search engines should have similar documentation

You could write a bash script to do it and perform searches from the terminal. It will open a new tab or window in your browser with the term you entered with the appropriate settings. Then set the bash script as an alias to make it easier to use. I found a similar script and modified it for ddg. doesn't seem to work 100% though, per usual it works on my machine, as-is no warranty, you need to install jq first if you already haven't.

#!/bin/bash

# Check if a search term was provided
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <search_term>"
    exit 1
fi

# URL encode the search term (handles spaces and special characters)
encoded_search=$(printf '%s' "$1" | jq -sRr @uri)

# Construct the DuckDuckGo search URL with a date filter for content before Jan 1, 2020
duckduckgo_url="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%24encoded_search&ia=web&t=h_&df=on&dfdate=before-2020-01-01"

# Open the URL in a new browser tab (works with most common browsers)
xdg-open "$duckduckgo_url" 2>/dev/null || open "$duckduckgo_url"

A lot of content creators have started adding a few seconds of voice over to the beginning of videos because people will immediately stop watching a video if they are at all suspicious that it's AI generated and the dead give away is the AI voice.